Of Mice and Modems

This is about my partner’s Wi-Fi problems. About a year ago, my other half started having this weird issue where the Wi-Fi on her work Surface would just… stop. It would drop from whatever network it was connected to and then refuse to reconnect for anywhere between five minutes and an hour.

It wasn’t just her, either; a few of her colleagues had the same problem. It happened both at home and in the office, with no set pattern.

As an aside, her phone was temperamental at best and hated the 5GHz Wi-Fi on our home router, so I had to disable that and limit it to 2.4GHz bands. For some reason, her work Wi-Fi was also limited to 2.4GHz.

One day, after hearing her complain while working from home, I decided I had to find the cause. My own work could wait.

I turned off anything that could interfere with Wi-Fi at home; my work laptop, the TV, consoles, both our phones, and still the problem persisted.

Then I saw it. The only thing I hadn’t turned off that wasn’t hard-wired was… her wireless mouse.

That couldn’t be it… could it?

I unplugged her mouse: bing, Wi-Fi connected.

Plugged it back in: five minutes later, bong, Wi-Fi disconnected.

Unplugged it again: bing, connected instantly.

Turns out her mouse was using a frequency that killed Wi-Fi within a certain radius, but only on 2.4GHz bands.

She told her colleagues who were having the same problem. They unplugged their wireless mice, and poof, every Wi-Fi problem vanished.

She’s since upgraded her phone, so it doesn’t complain about 5GHz, and that’s back on at home… but she’s now banned from using wireless mice here.

Turns out mice don’t just chew through wires after all!